Tall Tales about Highest Peaks

The urge to scale the highest mountains sends swarms of fit, outdoor-types upwards into the rarified atmosphere to plant their little flags and have their faces photographed 'on the roof of the world'. But Dr Karl thinks they've picked the wrong peaks...

By Karl S. Kruszelnicki

Every school student is told that the highest point on Earth is the tip of Mount Everest, and that Kosi is the tallest mountain in Australia. But every school student has been misled.

So what about Kosi?

Well, let me try this sentence on you - "Australia doesn't have any active volcanoes, and its tallest mountain, Mt. Kosciuszko was named by Count Paul Strzelecki in 1840". About the only thing right in the previous sentence is that some of the names might be pronounced correctly.

The person after whom the mountain is named, Tadeusz Kosciuszko was both an officer in the Polish Army and a statesman. While serving as a military officer, he had to flee Poland after an unsuccessful elopement. In 1776, he joined the colonial forces in America who were fighting for independence from the British. As chief of the engineering corps, he spent two years fortifying West Point, and rescued the fledgling American Army from British advances by helping them with essential river crossings. By the end of the war, he'd reached the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army and had been granted U.S. citizenship. Kosciuszko returned to Poland, and after arming the peasants, led a national uprising against the countries then occupying Poland - Prussia and Russia. He also freed the Polish peasants from their serfdom. The uprising collapsed when he was taken prisoner by the Russians, but was granted freedom in 1796. He returned to the USA, became close friends with the then Vice President Thomas Jefferson, and before leaving for France sold his estate to pay for the freedom and education of his black slaves.

Kosi was an upstanding and kind fellow, with towering intelligence and integrity - and probably deserved to have a mountain named after him.

Paul Strzelecki was one of many Europeans who magically acquired the title of Count when they landed in Australia. He was certainly not the first non-Aborigine to "discover" Kosciuszko, but he was the first to name it.

Kosciuszko is indeed the tallest mountain (2,228 metres) on the Australian mainland.

However, the tallest mountain on Australian Sovereign Territory is Mt. Mawson (2,745 metres) on the Big Ben mountain complex on Heard Island. Heard Island is in the Southern Indian Ocean, about 4,000 km south-west of Perth. Australia doesn't have the technology to monitor the volcanic activity of this weather bound and remote island, but there were some very spectacular eruptions on Big Ben in February 2001.

But Kosciuszko does have the distinction of being the tallest mountain on the Australian mainland.

Well, that sorts out Kosi. But what about Everest being the tallest mountain in the world?

Back in the 17th and 18th Century, it was thought that a certain Mount Chimborazo, an extinct snow-capped volcano in Ecuador, was the highest point on Earth, at 6,310 metres above sea level. In 1852, the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India measured that a certain mountain with the name of Peak XV was the tallest at 8,840 metres. The British gave it the name of Everest in 1865, after Sir George Everest, who was the British Surveyor General from 1830-1843, even though the local Tibetans and Nepalese had already given the mountain some perfectly decent names (Chomolungma or Mother Goddess of the Land by the Tibetans, and Sagarmatha by the Nepalese).

The height of Mt. Everest was adjusted to 8,848 metres in 1955, and then to 8,850 metres in 1999, after a team of nine climbers used state-of-the-art satellite measuring devices on the summit. All of these heights are measured above sea level, or where the local sea level would be, if a mountain was not there.

So let's look at Mt Chimborazo, which was once thought to be the tallest mountain on Earth. It was first climbed by Edward Whymper in 1880.

The reason that Mt. Everest is not the highest point on Earth is that the Earth spins - and this spin makes the whole planet bulge outwards at the equator.

Mt. Chimborazo is about 1.5° from the equator, while Mt. Everest is a lot further around the curve of the Earth at 28°. So even though Mt. Chimborazo is about 2,540 metres closer to sea level than Mt Everest, it is about 2,202 metres further away from the centre of the Earth. If this were better known, perhaps the achievements of the Conqueror of Chimborazo, Edward Whymper, would have made more of a bang. (In fact, there are three other peaks (Huascaran, Cotopaxi and Kilimanjaro) that are also "higher" than Everest.)

But Everest is still the highest mountain above sea level. So, by the end of 2001, some 1,314 people had reached the summit, and 167 people had died trying. If you have $US 65,000, and are physically fit, you can try to reach the peak. But if you don't have that kind of money to blow, you can console yourself with the knowledge that they're all climbing the wrong mountain anyway. On the other hand, Mt Everest is growing at 4 mm each year as India rams into Tibet, so all the wealthy people have to do is wait another half-million years ...